History of art: from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
Domain 3 - History of art: from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
This section tests chronological grasp and the ability to connect form, function and belief. You should recognise major periods, building types, materials and iconographic formulas, and explain change without reducing it to progress. Dates need not be exact to the year, but century and sequence must be secure.
Core rules and concepts
- Egypt: frontality, composite view, registers, hierarchical scale, durable stone for tombs and temples; image and inscription serve eternal order.
- Greek: Archaic kouros/kore with frontal stance and archaic smile; Classical contrapposto and ideal proportion (Polykleitos’s canon); Hellenistic drama, torsion and pathos. Architectural orders: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian.
- Roman: veristic portraiture, historical relief, concrete, arch, vault and dome; Pantheon, triumphal arches, baths, mosaics. Roman art adapts Greek models for civic and imperial messages.
- Early Christian and Byzantine: basilica plan, transept, apse, catacomb painting; centralized plans; gold-ground mosaic, Pantocrator, Theotokos; Hagia Sophia’s pendentive dome. Images teach doctrine and assert sacred presence.
- Romanesque: pilgrimage church, barrel vault, groin vault, thick walls, small windows, sculpted tympanum and capitals; Santiago de Compostela. Gothic: pointed arch, rib vault, flying buttress, stained glass, verticality, rose windows; Chartres and Reims.
Worked example
Compare a Romanesque pilgrimage church with a Gothic cathedral. Romanesque: heavy masonry, barrel vault, few openings, dark interior, sculpture in tympana warning and instructing pilgrims. Gothic: rib vaults and flying buttresses transfer thrust outward, allowing tall clerestories and stained glass; the interior becomes luminous and vertically directed. Reasoning: structural change enables a changed sensory and theological experience-from fortified shelter to an image of heavenly light. A strong answer names structural parts and links them to effect; it does not simply say Gothic is ‘lighter and taller.’
Traps
- Calling all medieval art ‘Gothic’; Romanesque precedes Gothic.
- Confusing Byzantine central plan with Roman basilica.
- Attributing perspective to medieval art; linear perspective is Renaissance.
- Using ‘Dark Ages’ as an explanation instead of evidence.
- Mixing up Greek Archaic and Classical stance.